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DeviceGuru writes "Via Technologies has launched the second generation of its signature mini-motherboard standard. Mini-ITX 2.0, an evolutionary update to the seven-year-old 170×170mm form-factor, introduces new and emerging buses and interfaces such as PCI Express, SATA, Gig-E, and HD A/V, while preserving backwards-compatibility with the original standard. Mini-ITX has been a popular form-factor for a range of space-constrained hobbyist and commercial applications."

Well, it's a good question, actually. While VIA has long touted their support for Linux and open source, Real World results have often lagged behind. For example, various Linux drivers they have released have been one or more of buggy, closed source, and tied to forks of popular open-source projects. So, while Linux does actually run on all boards I have tried, not all hardware is _fully_ supported in practice.

Mini-ITX has been a popular form-factor for a range of space-constrained hobbyist and commercial applications.

I have one at home not because I'm "space-constrained" - but because it really nice and small Linux server which does everything I nee from it.

Thanks to fanless design, loudest part of the rig is hard drive. That, along with minimalistic power consumption, makes it very suitable for always-on system. I use it for back-ups and some performance-oriented development and it is just bliss.

The only downside of buying Mini-ITX, is that it's very hard to find suitable components as well as good case. Selection isn't very wide and prices often bite.

I've heard another downside to Mini-ITX is that the throughput of the gigabit Ethernet ports is not up to speed with the ports on full-size computers. Has the situation improved? Will it be better with Mini-ITX 2.0? That's the first thing I looked for in TFA and the "more information" link it provided, but all they say is it has a gig-E port.

I suppose if they used those crappy chipsets with Mini-ITX 1.0, they'll continue to use them with Mini-ITX 2.0. I wonder why they can't simply use a decent chipset? There are small form factor computers available for a few hundred dollars, as well as tiny laptops, that have decent gigabit ports. Certainly price, size, and power consumption are not a barrier. Oh, well, I'll wait for a decent Mini-ITX 2.0 board that uses good chipsets and comes with a warranty. Until then, small form factor will have to do.

The reason they use crappy chipsets is because they're cheaper than the good stuff, and Mini-ITX is primarily about money, secondly about size.

I mostly stopped caring about Mini-ITX when I realized I could gut a low-end laptop for less money and better performance than Via's offerings. Their prices just aren't in line with my perception of value. There are also several alternatives on the market, most of them based on Intel mobile chipsets, like the Arcom Apollo.

If I wanted something even smaller, there's the Gumstix/Netstix. This Mini-ITX 2.0 seems like a whole lotta nothing, too late to market, too costly to care.

There are mini-itx boards using intel and other non-via chipsets. You don't have to buy a via mini-itx board. MSI, Jetway, Intel, Commell and others make mini-itx boards and they are available several different cpu socket / chipset combinations, just like ATX boards are. There are limits of course, some things just dont's fit on a 7"x7" board, not to mention power and cooling requirements for some chips would be difficult to accomodate.

Actually, if the chipsets were any decent, people would build file servers around them. The biggest (*rimshot*) thing going for Mini-ITX is the low power consumption. If I could replace my two home servers with smaller machines that draw a third of the power, yet can adequately serve my media and backup needs, I would spend the money.

The problem is Mini-ITX does everything poorly. Terrible performance, overpriced accessories, usually lots of modding work to get things fitted, and you have to pay a premium for the privilege of being mediocre.

I store all of my software installation discs as ISOs on my fileserver. A hard drive being tremendously faster than an optical drive (among the plenty of other conveniences) would be completely negated by a slow throughput. For movies it doesn't matter - it's a single file that doesn't need a tremendous amount of bandwidth. Game installation on the other hand is painfully slow if the connection sucks - even a Fast Ethernet connection is pretty tedious for that kind of thing. I get pretty annoyed speed-w

Wouw... Just wouw...What kind of equipment do you have that can sustain those rates? Standard consumer grade hard disk drives can seldom sustain more than 60MB/s, my DVD drive does around 24MB/s - CDs are around 8MB/s - on a really good day(yes its above 20MB/s, but if 20 annoys you I'm assuming you are blasting away well above 100MB/s) . Also why are you reinstalling so often that less than 20MB/s is a problem?

I'm not going anywhere near saturating full gig-e, but 50-60MB/s (hard drive limited minus some network overhead) isn't unlikely. I'm not using a $20 bargin bin 5-port switch (I got a 16-port GigE D-link now), but even back when I was I still saw decent rates. I'll be interested to see if/how this changes tomorrow, as I just ordered 1.5TB of storage prompted by a Newegg special (it's been long overdue, even if it's overkill for the moment - I still have to micromanage the remaining space on my current dis

They have these nifty inventions that let you attach something to something else rather permanently. The most commonly used are called screws and bolts, less know things include glues and epoxys... If you're more adept, you can construct your own brackets and holders out of sheet metal.

I want to build a simple media centre and always on server for my house, I think a via board running at 1.5Ghz should do the job, viewing and recording SD tv, playing movies, serving files maybe mpd and stuff.
Does anyone have a reason why this is a bad idea?

I'm doing just fine with MythTV on a 1.0Ghz fanless board. I can record two SD shows at once while watching a third, all from a single hard drive. Just be sure to use the Openchrome video driver if you want playback to be watchable.

Remember to get a TV Tuner that does MPEG encoding onboard. For recording two shows at once, you'll need something like the Hauppauge WinTV PVR 500 [hauppauge.com]. With a card like this, your processor will hardly get used at all in the encoding process.

Agreed. I'm running KnoppMyth on a 700 MHz Celeron. Encoding is fine - the Hauppauge PVR-150 handles it without a hitch. The machine can just barely handle playback, but my MacBook makes a nice, fast frontend.

I'll have to try your suggestion of video driver to see if it improves playback performance.

It's clearly a driver issue of some sort - things go fast/slow/fast/slow if I use the default VIA drivers. Note that the board I'm using is very different (older) than what's being talked about in this article. It has a C7 processor, and uses the CN700 chipset, which has a built-in limit of 1024x1024 resolution for MPEG2 decoding. My board also does not have HD outputs, unless you count the analog VGA (I use the low-tech svideo to connect to my SDTV).

AverMedia M780 is a dual-tuner PCIe X1 card whose driver allows it to be used as a hardware MPEG decoder for DVD or Blu-Ray. Coincidentally, it gives the best reception of any card I've ever used. Unfortunately, as of right now it does not work under Linux, but a 1.5GHz C7 w/ 2GB of RAM and the onboard Via graphics is powerful enough to run Vista Ultimate edition with Aero turned on at S-Video or component video 480p resolution. Not that you'd actually use that particular OS. (Well, my HTPC is running it, but I got a free copy through my work MSDN subscription.) It's probably not powerful enough for 1080p, but you can install a discrete graphics card if you prefer.

Personally I like simple, bullet proof, and dedicated ports for universal devices (lets not discuss boxes that only have power and network connectivity) but I wish they would move to a lot more breakouts that attach modularly to the case and plug in to the motherboard (like extra usb ports)

Additionally this really looks more conceptual then already printing boards (no flashing links on via's website about this new format). The specs list min. 4 usb ports and 1 gig ethernet. So I see no guarantee that

I am also in the "no PS/2, but please leave 1 serial port" camp. For a linux box (and what better use for ITX is there?), it's really nice to have serial console support so that you don't have to ever hook up a keyboard and monitor. It's even better if the BIOS supports serial console redirection, so that you can even edit bios settings over the serial interface.

Until the BIOS guys come up with a way to do serial console over USB (which wouldn't be too hard really), I'd like the serial port to stay.

Would be nice, but it would have to be over a separate ethernet port. The shared ethernet port with two MAC stuff is unreliable junk.

However few if any mini-ITX boards have a BMC, where as they all with the addition of a small amount of code in the BIOS could do a full serial console. There is no additional hardware cost involved, it is all software.

If you get the boards based on the ATOM reference platform you will notice that it contains both serial and, get this, a PARALLEL port.

Seriously, the parallel and serial ports are for embedded applications. It's much easier to use those 8 bits on the parallel port for dry contact control. And most small embedded controllers have serial interfaces.

Why does it have to be legacy free? This is not supposed to be JUST a consumer computer platform.

It's supposed to be both a consumer platform as well as an embedded platform and you can't be an embedded platform if you're legacy free.

A parallel port is a lot of complication and pins to drive 8 contacts; for $20 you could build a board with real relays that have much better electrical isolation from the motherboard and a USB or serial interface. (And that's what it cost me in a one-off construction; presumably you could do it much cheaper en mass). In addition to avoiding the space dedicated to the connector you can avoid resetting the relays on reboot -- something you can't do if you're driving the relays directly.

Well, with the parallel port available, I don't need that extra $20 board. The point is that it's all in one component, whereas your board would not be.And if you're going through all the trouble of USB at that step you're already consuming an obscene amount of power in the design we are talking about when compared to a simple parallel, or even serial, port.

Yes.Why? The PS/2 ports are only useful for using a PS/2 KVM which are cheap and common.There are MANY devices that only work with RS-232 ports. USB converts are on the whole junk and not very reliable.You will see these mini-ITX boards used a lot in embedded systems so yea I will lose the PS/2 port any day but please keep the come and lpt ports.

USB converts are on the whole junk and not very reliable.I have heard similar bad things about USB-PS2 converters. I have at least once found a keyboard that refused to work with the USB-PS2 converter I had (the keyboard worked fine on all motherboard PS2 ports I tried, the converter worked fine with another keyboard. My syspicion is that the converter was playing fast and loose with the specs of the PS2 interface but I never checked).

so for those of us with existing PS2 kvm switches motherboards with PS2 p

I was all set to reply to your post by pointing out that PS/2 keyboards are $4, while USB keyboards are $60 or something. Then I checked at frys.com, and found USB keyboards for $10. I hadn't realized USB prices had come down so much. Still, a lot of individuals and businesses have huge piles of PS/2 keyboards sitting around that they'd like to be able to keep on using.

When most people will be running a legacy OS on these such as Windows XP, which does not fully and properly support USB input devices properly, the lack of a keyboard can be problematic for actually using the board.

Yes, it's an exception when a USB keyboard doesn't work, but I've seen it often enough to realize how much of a problem it'd be for a product targeted at picking up at least -some- of the people wanting to install Windows.

Great, maybe in a couple of years you can actually order and receive one. Still pretty much impossible to get any of their nano or pico products, and even the original mini stuff is scarce. VIA has a history of 'annoucements' and trade show demos, but actual product delivery seems to be problematic -- at least here in the states.

Well, their reputation was tarnished by the C3 to C7 transition. They stopped production on the C3 because of a patent issue and promised the C7 would be available right away. Production problems pushed the C7 release out many months. So, for a while, all you could get from VIA was existing stock and promises.

DeviceGuru is adding little needed comentary to the official VIA post [via.com.tw]. So why are we linking to DG instead of VIA's official site? (I know this is slashdot, gotta keep peoples views up and gain them ad revenue) There is even a video link on via's main page about mini-ITX 2.0 (no that it is worth watching).

It's the northbridge, I believe.I have several motherboards that use this configuration including some nForce boards. I think it's to make the leads as short as possible without too much of that wasteful zig-zagging that equalizes their lengths.

That's how some makers, like Dell, solved the problem of using AMD 64 processors on BTX boards (the BTX specification puts the processor too far away from the memory and moving the chipset at an angle leaves more room for memory leads since AMD puts the memory contr

The small form factor is all very well, but the previous generation of boards simply didn't do what they claimed to. HDTV and H.264 decoding in hardware are supposed to work, but are unsupported, for example.

When you look at the high cost of these boards and the special cases and PSUs for them, combined with terrible performance (both CPU and components like gigabit ethernet or SATA) I can't see why anyone would want one. You can build a faster, cheaper and just as low power system using a cheap underclocked and undervolted Sempron and mATX mobo, with only a slightly larger (and much cheaper) case.

I'm kid of curious why Via is't pushing their pico-ITX form factor much, instead putting more steam behind nano-ITX. It is substantially smaller - about the size of a deck of playing cards and (as I understand it) doesn't need nearly as much heat dissipation or power as the nano-ITX.